Chronology-wise the first episode of Berserk takes place after the last episode considering Guts already has his prosthetic arm and missing eye. Even though this is how it works in the manga, with his time with the Band of the Hawks being a flashback, the episode doesn’t follow the manga and I’m still unsure if it follows the overall plot at all, as you are never really sure if the Count at the start was Griffith or not. I personally think the films did it right by starting chronologically at the beginning, introducing the character when he was younger and building him up towards the terrifying climax.

Gungrave

Once again we have a first episode that takes place in the future but this one is set halfway through the anime and without giving any context as to what’s going on what’s actually going in the first episode. It’s very strange and slow paced with action that more or less confuses you than makes you want to watch more. Like Berserk the second episode is where the story begins and despite the creators intentions to intrigue you with the cool character Brandon Heat was to become, it just made me feel like it was going to be another bad post apocalypse anime until I finally got around to watching episode 2 and really got into it.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

If you’re going by the chronology that it was aired in, the first episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, or episode ‘zero’, was not really the first episode but a short film they make during the second season. Watching this episode first could give the impression that the entire anime is going to be about a bunch of high school students making amateur movies and for an anime that doesn’t really get interesting until the end of episode 3 you really don’t want to suffer through this unnecessary prologue.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Now this one is more my opinion than general consensus but I personally think you should the skip the first episode of Eva. Watching it this way not only do you skip Shinji’s squealing from episode 1 but you get dropped right into the tense scene when he’s about the fight Sachael without any need to go through the 10 minute preamble of jargon and badly scripted emotional baggage. It’s almost like Anno learnt to write in-between episodes 1 and 2 because the amount of telling instead of showing that goes on in the first episode in comparison to the second is insane.

15 Responses to Anime You Should Skip The First Episodes Of

Save for Haruhi, I don’t think that people should skip things like Eva’s first episode if they want the full experience for themselves the first time around. People should be able to decide for themselves whether a first episode or not does well.

I don’t think we should skip any episode of any show; in no other art form are you supposed to miss out portions of a story, even if its an adaptation, based on personal preference, so I wouldn’t recommend anyone to do it with anime. Directors and writers choose episode order for a reason, even if it goes against source material, and viewers, I think, should respect that by keeping the given order and trying to see what that reason was if anything is different.

If you skip an episode, you miss out on the ‘full package’ of what you’re signing up for by watching it. It’s much harder then to relate to people who just watched it normally without going into some kind of ‘you watched it wrong’ discourse, even though you were the one who messed around with the order yourself.

For the same reasons, the first episode of berserk could be considered filler as it doesnt follow the overall plot nor is in the manga. Do you think people should not skip flashback episodes? I would use this reason for the first episode of gungrave as the first is just a confusing flashforward of something that is repeated again in chronology anyway. Its really just a spoiler.

Hah, I call BS at this point. Not only are there other ways you can easily tell if episodes are filler without watching them (internet/manga/light novel/word of mouth), but you totally can rate a show highly even if you tampered with it, nothing’s stopping you but your ego (honor & pride same dif.). I’m curious to know which of these anime have you actually watched? I get the feeling you don’t watch shonen because the majority of them have filler/flashback episodes, but I would add Wolf’s Rain to the mix for skipping the four flashback episodes that happen halfway through it that don’t progress the story at all. Maybe your opinions spurn from just watching no nonsense, good anime without these?

Haven’t seen Gungrave but I can agree with Berserk. Though I don’t think it’s a massive issue that episode doesn’t add much to the series as a whole considering where it finishes and was probably included as another push to get viewers to read the manga afterwards.